Refine your company’s multi-year technical strategy. Deep knowledge in your area of specialization and are recognized in the industry. The ability to provide overarching technical direction. Lead reviews and mentor staff engineers.ġ4+ years of experience. Funnel the company’s engineering talent to promising avenues. Provide direction for design and architecture. The skill to resolve emergencies with leaders.Ĭontribute to a multi-year technology strategy by planning and forecasting. Delivered products having cross-team contribution and impact. Been in good books with your company’s leadership, owing to your competence. The vision to anticipate technical change. Put customers first and set strategic short-term targets.
Mentor others with high-level technical guidance. The skill to engineer a solution for an unclear project quickly. Technical track: If you prefer managing code, this is how your software engineer career progression should pan out.
Apply your knowledge across domains of the product to arrive at creative solutions. Take responsibility for technical testing. A top-level grasp of your contributions and a great deal of technical and emotional maturity.ĭeliver products on time. Proven to have expertise in at least one domain of your company’s codebase. Work with important projects and clients.Ħ-9+ years of experience and have assumed some tech lead roles in the past. Draw out software development plans for engineers. Improve your team’s quality and effectiveness. Take 100% responsibility for an engineering project. Chosen to step into the managerial side of things, take on additional responsibilities, and lead a team by providing technical direction. Contribute to the company wiki.ħ+ years of experience. The skills to own medium-complexity projects. Proven to make ace design decisions and be fool proof when debugging. Minimise rework.ĥ-8+ years of experience. Work without little day-to-day supervision, efficiently. Give junior engineers guidance and take constructive feedback from seniors.
An understanding of the workflow and the potential to own tasks, from design to completion. The ability to learn from mistakes quickly.
#PRINCIPAL SOFTWARE ENGINEER VS SOFTWARE ENGINEER CODE#
The ability to write correct code with some supervision, using company best practices.
Imbibe the company’s values and strike a balance between asking for help and finding solutions.Ģ-6+ years of experience. Competence in 1 core language and a grasp of programming foundations. Below is a description of a generic software engineer promotion path, drawing from templates outlined by Rent the Runaway, Glossier and Meetup. Here, the software engineer career path deviates when you pick between managing code or managing people. A hierarchical job ladder or lattice through which one traverses laterally is not only a great help to job-seeking or employed software engineers, but is also necessary for managers, HR personnel and other stakeholders.Īs an engineer, knowing a company’s software engineer hierarchy is an ideal way to see which edge of the knife needs sharpening, or in other words, what your short-term goals could be and the skills or experience needed to achieve them.Ī quick survey of the job market will reveal that a host of tech companies adopt the dual-track career path. While the concept of climbing clearly-defined rungs in today’s fluid job space is questionable, the flat ‘company paradigm’ doesn’t yield much good either.